Original subtitles

How the military or special operations views the importance of an optic is not

in the category of sport.

It's in the category of life or death.

It makes the difference.

Shaving a second off of a target acquisition over your adversary means

win. He doesn't.

You go home. He doesn't.

And that's extremely critical because on the other end is a family.

a team that relies on you, a country that has dispatched you to represent

abroad and defend their freedoms.

And so it's not just an object to us.

It's our lives.

My father came from South Africa when he was 18 or 19 years old to go to school

here. Proving that he could come here and build a company with all these

employees and make a product that's accepted and now accepted around the

I think that's the essence of the American dream.

For the first 22, 23 years, he was still working at Ford Motor.

My dad said he used his brain there for a week a year.

He got awards there for different things he suggested, but he still said he

didn't feel like he was using his potential.

He's had quite a resume. He was working for Ford at that time, and he had worked

for a company that built things for NASA.

Everything that Trujillo makes, he designed it at night.

He was the designer, I was the machinist, and then Stephen would

parts.

He developed a rifle scope and iron sights, but it wasn't really different

or his until he developed the ACOG.

He realized the prism in a binocular, if you put a reticle behind that, that

then you could adjust that prism itself and make a very compact and very strong

scope, which became the ACOG.

So that's when something became...

more distinctly ours, and it didn't do very well. Sales were very low. The

company was carried by Ironsight sales.

Until 2004, we sold 100 ,000 of these. It was 18 years.

In the next 18 months, we sold the second 100 ,000 to the Marine Corps, and

had to go from a couple hundred a month to eventually get to 13 ,000 a month of

the four -power aircraft.

So there's a lot of history in this room.

We've got a lot of our products, birth times, a lot of my dad's patents, and

original drawing of the ACOG.

I find it incredible that my father was able to see a prism right here and a

pair of binoculars, then run it all the way through to a product. And in a

matter of a couple months, he went from the idea to here.

The U .K.

military were spending money on a very similar design.

The difference was that prism in the middle and moving that prism versus

the entire scope.

To make something strong enough for the military, if you're going to adjust the

entire scope, the whole mechanism has to be huge and very, very heavy, at least

double if not triple the weight. The U .K. government and the Canadian

government both spent 20 years and millions of dollars to develop something

similar, but that couldn't really keep up.

Hi, my name is Josh Varner. I've worked here at Trijicon for 22 years now. I'm

the machining manager.

We're here in the machining building, and I'm about to take on a quick little

tour, and we'll start with the admin building.

So here we have the admin room.

We like to say this is where all the magic happens.

When the engineers finish designing a product in the computer, they send us

the model, and our programmers work on...

creating the program for the CNC machines and our engineer works on

design tools, all that jazz.

The fun part is watching the animation of the machine in action once it's

actually programmed.

Mathematically everything is identical to the machine and this helps protect us

from machine collisions and also gives us a lot of information about our final

result on the part.

So we use this to find mistakes before we make them in the real world.

Right now we have 19 CNC machines on our floor, 10 mils and 9 lathes. They each

machine parts differently and we have to use them all in conjunction to make a

complete part.

So this is a good example of why we use aluminum.

You can see it's pretty lightweight, very easy, but it's very strong.

If this same piece of material was steel, it'd probably weigh 15 to 20

This only weighs one.

Your average soldier has to carry 75 pounds of equipment on his person at all

times. So every ounce we can shave off an optic is every ounce a soldier has to

carry less when he's on the field.

A part's done in here.

We want to take a look.

So you can see this is the vertical axis.

And this is the tool inside the tool holder that comes down and does its

When it's done, the machine stops. Then this whole table will rotate so that

this feature is up, and it will do the same thing.

We make a lot of parts, and the way we identify them is with a serial number.

And the way that we put a serial number on a forging is with a laser etcher. We

actually burn the number into every one of our housings that we make with our

laser etcher.

So this...

You can see, laser etched housing, this has been through the first operation.

And one machine on the other side of the floor is a lathe that holds it and

spins it while tools come in there to remove all of this material.

You can see the light breakers to reduce reflection, all the high -pitched

threads that we use for all the lens retainers, and the back through hole on

that. Then it gets pictured up onto this machine over here, where it does all

the rest of the main housing features.

This feature right here we call the racetrack.

This is an external feature. It sticks out, you can see, just slightly right

there. This is the mating eyepiece.

It has the same racetrack feature on it, but it's an internal feature cut into

the part.

When you match up the mating housing and the mating eyepiece and squeeze them

together, we machine it with such precision that it sticks together by

Certain features are harder to machine than others, and we like to check on

those from time to time.

And a lot of times what I'm checking for is little tiny birds.

Because if you have a little tiny burr on something that's threaded, when you

to screw it in an assembly, it catches and it makes their life very difficult.

So we need to get rid of the sharp edges.

So that all happens in this room.

What happens is that heart and tiny ceramic stones get dumped into this bowl

the same time.

When the machine starts, the side of the bowl stays static. It doesn't move.

But the bottom of the bowl spins very fast.

And what that does is it creates a vortex of rocks and parts.

And these ceramic rocks rub off all of those sharp edges.

So when the parts come out, they're soft to the touch.

So here's a part that hasn't been tumbled.

And you can see there's, see that sharp edge down there?

If I was to run my finger hard and fast across that, it would cut my finger.

We can't have that. Any place that's been cut is a sharp corner.

could have a burr sticking out that could cut the operator when they're

assembling it, that could disable the function of the optic, it could

with assembly, and make it a non -working optic.

This is the part after it's been tumbled.

See, I can run my finger all up and down there hard, and it's not cut.

All the sharp corners are now smooth, and this part is good to go, safe to

assemble.

You can see the finish on it.

We sandblast every housing that we send out before it goes to anodize.

Anodize is the black coating that's on all of our optics.

And when you sandblast it, it makes for a nice, even, matte black finish after

anodizing.

So to recap, most all of our main housings come in through forging. A

piece of aluminum that comes in like this. It goes through all our machine

operations, our deburring operations, and in the end, it's sandblasted and

to go out for anodizing.

First time I saw this optic, I checked in my first field team. Keep in mind,

internet didn't exist at the time. This was 1996.

What was the SOPMOD kit, which was a kit designed by Special Operations Command

to outfit an M4 platform, this rifle.

And that included fore grip,

hand grip, a laser.

But the thing that grabbed me most was this space -age looking.

optic. I'd never seen it before. I grew up hunting, so I was used to magnified

optics on hunting rifles, but nothing like this, especially something that was

illuminated through a little noodle.

What this is is a fiber optic sort of light gathering, we call it a noodle,

rests on top. Now this transmits the light that's received from outside of

scope into an illuminated reticle inside of the scope.

The good thing about that is that there's no batteries required.

Any natural light creates enough light for this fiber optic strand to

the reticulant side.

Now, that's extremely important when you're in the field for a long period of

time, particularly in a maritime, littoral sort of environment where

going to be wet and most times your batteries are going to get wet, and

you're jumping from 25 ,000 feet into the ocean.

going under the ocean, coming out of the ocean, going across land, coming back

across land, and going back out to sea again.

That optic has to perform.

And the testing, the stringent testing that goes on here at TrichCon and at

Crane, ensure that the end user has something dependable.

Our products are used in...

Very different environment.

And if we're from, like, the desert, Iraq, Afghanistan, to very cold

and a lot of times they're dropped out of airplanes, right?

They're on the weapon or in cargo boxes. So if it's coming out of an airplane,

very cold, very low pressure, maybe dropped into a very humid environment,

product needs to work when it gets wet.

So this is one of our high - and low -temp chambers. We have in here a couple

our four -power ACOGs.

That's negative 51 degrees.

Can do temperature shock from negative 59 Fahrenheit all the way up to about

159 Fahrenheit, and that's by transferring from one chamber to the

And that will stress our glue bonds, glass inside it, and all fiber.

Make sure that it stays together. It doesn't come apart, come loose.

A lot of military solicitations in particular require a 66 -foot or a 20

immersion depth.

That's so that the really high -end operators like Navy SEALs can actually

to that depth with their kit.

So we'll put an optic inside a bucket in here and then submerge it underwater

and we'll hook it up to our shop air.

We've done testing before with ACOG's down to 100 meters I believe.

So this is where we do our drop testing at our night garage.

We've done a lot of it as shown on our wonderful floor here.

So a lot of times we get a military contract solicitation and requirements

built into that for drop.

The variables are usually height, which are usually either one meter, meter and

a half, or two meters. Then the other variable is actually the test surface.

So sometimes we'll put a piece of three -quarter inch plywood down here and drop

onto that if that's what the contract solicitation calls for. And other times

we'll drop directly onto concrete.

So this bar is the same weight as a fully loaded M16A2 of 8 .8

pounds. So what this is replicating is when we drop this upside down, it's

basically replicating if you were a Marine or soldier in the field with a

loaded M16 rifle and you drop this product on the ground and it hit in the

case scenario of it being optic down, the product is still going to live. One,

two, three.

It's really literally bulletproof. We've seen these come back from the field

with bullet holes through them that still work. I can't really single out

story that comes to mind, but there have been many from the law enforcement and

military community where people have said, hey, I was in a gunfight.

I got shot. The optic may have got shot. My rifle got shot. And the one piece of

kit that was still working was my treasure gun optic, and it helped me get

of a gunfight and live.

And that's extraordinarily humbling when you hear stories like that.

Everything I do, I like to have quality, because I know everything I do is for a

reason. It's people behind my do's and my don'ts. So if I mess up, that's

on the line. I don't like to mess up.

I want to bring people home, just like my children.

We have military fans, yes, we are.

Marines, we got Marines, Navy men, we got Army men. Don't ever call them the

same thing. They don't like that.

They're very competitive.

I got four kids. My oldest two are in the military.

My oldest daughter, she did the military for about four or five years.

And now she's a police lady here in South Carolina.

I'm proud of them because they put their life on the line for us.

It takes a lot to go out there and have courage and to do the things that they

do to make sure everybody's safe.

My daughter sent me a picture one time, and she had one of our scopes on her

rifle, and it just made me feel good.

Why did it make you feel good? Because I know I made it.

So it made me feel good that, you know, they're using something that we created

to keep her safe.

Every time when people come home, anywhere from the Army, the Marines,

when they come home to AFAB, I know I did my job making what we make.

What I see when I look at the American flag and what I feel, an immense sense

pride and also an immense sense of worry,

which I think comes from being a parent and comes from being a

soldier, a sailor, in that it's always threatened,

which means it has to be defended.

And it unifies us under one thing.

And it tells us as a nation, as individuals within a nation, that you're

covered, no matter what.

And I'm not sure it's widely realized or even thought about these days.

But I don't think anybody's watching military APCs on the intersections of

roads like you would see in a foreign country.

Where your government's military is used against you.

Where it serves as a protective force. You don't see that in America.

And that's for good reason.

And I don't ever want to see that in America.

I've seen it too much in foreign countries.

Where it gives them this sense of security.

But it's not for them.

So when I see the American flag and what it makes me feel like, pride and worry.

But I think again, as a parent, you worry. You worry about your kids at

You worry about where they are, what they're up to, what they're learning,

they're doing.

And I think if you're a responsible citizen in this country, you should be

thinking about the same thing for your country.

What are we doing?

How are we doing it?

How well are we doing it?

Are we growing?

Are we going in the right direction?

If I could share anything with the American public from my perspective, it

be always, always, always focus on the kids.

Always. We had our opportunity to grow up in a place that was safe and

to just explore interests and learn and grow.

About 12 years ago...

I started an organization called Word of Honor Fund.

Word of Honor Fund focuses on facilitating milestone events for these

children, things that the father would have done had he survived.

But since he fell, his legacy is left to those who knew him best.

And so what we do at Word of Honor Fund is we work with the mothers or the

surviving parent to determine where these children are in their

and make sure it stays true to what the father would have wanted.

And we pair them with mentors, and these mentors are those who knew the father

well. So we facilitate the entire thing. The cost of it and the coordination and

the planning and help the mentor do the thing with the children that the dad

would have done, like fly fishing for the first time.

We have a recent story where a young teenage boy,

white -tailed deer hunting, and he shot his first deer with a gun that his

father was making for him with his best friend.

And so the child was able to kill his first buck with his dad's rifle that he

was making for him with the mentor.

And there's nothing more powerful than a kid hearing your dad would be proud of

you right now from someone who knew the father.

It has a deeper meaning.

That's very near and dear to me. We feel that.

as an example to the rest of the American public on focusing on the kids

their growth and development to ensure that they become good, productive adults

as their fathers would have wanted.

Word of Honor Fund aspired to do that.